Moon Investigations: Students Forging New Literacy and Scientific-Mathematical Identities
This paper describes an interdisciplinary study where science/math and English methods preservice teachers were trained through experiencing an open-ended, project-enhanced learning environment. Due to the fact that most preservice teachers have never had any experience at performing project-enhanced investigations, our study centered on teacher training that allowed preservice teachers the opportunity to explore various "investigable" realms of mathematics and science phenomena. Preservice teachers were expected to collect data (including narrative data), think critically, and communicate results. The intention was to illustrate how students through keen observations with opportunities to use narrative as a vehicle for meaning making could construct knowledge and understanding--a skill necessary for both the scientist and the writer. It was hoped that such methods of teaching would inspire preservice teachers to enact this form of teaching and learning with their own future students.
[Children] use stories and other forms of symbolic expression in order to represent the world-to themselves-and each other-and thereby to make sense of it. (Scales, 1994, p. 102)








